GE Wins Defense Grant for Butterfly Wing-Based Sensor

A tropical Morpho Sulkowskyi butterfly, left, and a rendering of nanostructures found in the iridescent scales on the butterfly's wings are shown here. Source: General Electric Co. via Bloomberg

Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- General Electric Co.’s research arm
won a $6.5 million grant to develop sensors based on the
chemical-recognition abilities of butterfly wingtips that may be
used to detect emissions, explosives, and even disease from
people’s breath.

Using the four-year grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, researchers from GE’s
Niskayuna, New York-based research and development labs will
team with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the State
University of New York at Albany and the University of Exeter,
the company said in a statement.

Scientists at GE discovered three years ago that the wing
scales of Morpho butterflies have acute chemical-sensing
properties and began developing technology to replicate those
abilities. The submicroscopic structure beneath the refracting
colors on a butterfly’s wings interacts with the smallest traces
of airborne chemicals, Radislav Potyrailo, a principal
investigator on the project for GE, said in an interview.

“To make the structures from scratch using the existing
nanotechnology tools, it’s not easy,” he said. “So one of the
aspects of our program that is funded by DARPA is to develop
approaches that are really quite new."

The defense research agency is supporting further research
into such areas as modifying the butterfly structure to detect
vapors, he said.

Diseases, Food Safety

GE will also work to develop nonmilitary uses for the
sensors, such as wound-healing assessment, detecting diseases,
determining food safety and gauging power-plant emissions.

General Electric Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt is
spending $20 billion on technology development in the two years
through 2012, as the company works to bring innovative products
to market.

The Fairfield, Connecticut-based company wants to develop a
low-cost production method for sensors as big as an
identification badge or as small as 5 microns by 5 microns,
Potyrailo said. The average human hair is about 100 microns
wide.